“I was only five when I lost my mother, not that there was much to lose. Yara, for that was her name, had been reduced to nothing by Oumaima’s magic. A couple adopted me and I lived in their forest home somewhere between here and the west coast. I don’t know exactly where. I’m disorientated by all the changes here since I left the island sixty five years ago. The couple were kind, and insisted on getting me educated. But all through those years I missed my mother, and I became weary of the mischief done by the island’s interior. It poked at my flesh, disrupted my studying, disturbed my thoughts.”
I don’t mention how I also missed Tin Hanan, the queen of my world for the first five years of life. The woman doesn’t mind me talking about the island, though. She seems to understand perfectly why she has to lock her doors and close the blinds at sunset. She has to stay here so she’s accepted it. The island is the beast she lives with, and on. It gives her her livelihood, her existence, and as long as she’s careful it doesn’t harm her. She asks me what happened to the other fourteen passengers on the circular boat.
“A couple of them were only sixteen. This meant that they were classed as children, and they got asylum and were taken to the mainland. As for the others, one by one they vanished. They wandered around the island, even at night. They were too adventurous.”
“They strayed from the path.”
“They strayed from the path.”
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
We paused and drank blackcurrant juice. The best I’ve ever tasted.
“Did you grow these yourself?”
“Yes, with fertilizer from the beaches. Seaweed. Carry on.”
“So I said goodbye to my adoptive parents and travelled to Spain, then Morocco, into Algeria and down to Tamanrasset. A family took me in, and I carried on with my education, winning a place at university to study engineering. The island was wiped from my memory for a long time. When people asked me where I was from, I just said, ‘Tamanrasset’.”
I’d gone there looking for Tin Hanan but she wasn’t there. She must have entered the body of someone farther afield. I never saw her again. But I was to feel her one more time.
“Then I worked in a lot of places and became a success with my projects. Perhaps you’ve seen my work, and my photo in magazines?”
She tells me my face looks familiar but it’s not because of my work. It’s some other reason. The sun descends towards the western horizon, and she stands to bolt the doors. I help her to check all over her house, admiring its eco-perfection combined with comfort, almost luxury. We eat a relaxed dinner and I admire the way she has made cassava flavoursome. She tells me it’s the herbs and spices that she orders from all over the planet. People in every country have seed banks, in bomb-proof casks, for safety. We talk about agriculture, and I tell her of my past designs for wells. She’s very interested so I speak about the project I’m working on currently. It’s in Pakistan, and unlike all my wells of decades ago it isn’t robot operated. It’s mechanical but people use it, hands on. I’ve discovered that human beings need and value the experience of pulling their own water out of their own land.
She shows me to a room in the loft, and as I try to fall asleep, the hisses and whispers whirling around the exterior of the building make me agitated, almost suffocating me. I am fifteen again, itching to escape.
As day breaks we rise and open the doors and windows. I leave the woman hoeing her cassava patch, and walk back up towards the village.
My last act on the island is to go to my mother’s resting place. The cemetery was needed for cultivation, so like all those buried here, she has been relocated to a plain white building on a hilltop, and placed in a drawer, between hundreds of other drawers, each with a silver handle. I pull it open and see the bones of my mother, wrapped in a gauzy fabric made from nettles processed to feel like silk. I touch my forefinger on my lips and kiss it, then place it on her clavicle, the first part of her that I am conscious of knowing, as she clutched me to her, when my father was kicking her. Two arms encircle me. I cannot see them, but there is the jangle of seven bangles on each one.
Later, the skytrain whizzes me back to the coast, then another one takes me to the airport.
As I sit on the plane looking back at the island, it looks at me sheepishly, as if it wants to confess that all along it has been playing a practical joke, which has gone on for far too long.
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